[trakman]

I sure wished they would have worked for me. Looked like the real ticket to not have to change the grates every wheat harvest. Was covering 1 1/2 of the large wire concaves but couldn't get a clean sample in wheat. Tried everthing I knew with the rest of the machine to fix the problem but nothing helped. Running slotted grates with bars. Finally gave up and put the small wire concave in and sample was acceptable.

Any suggestions for the next time?

 

[doorknob]

Curious, were you cutting as high as possible to retain stubble length and spreading the residue?

How did you gauge what a full combine was?

 

[seedcleaner]

How was the sample not clean? White caps, stems...? What kind of wheat family and harvest moisture, conditions? I get along really good with them. How sharp and square are your concave edges. That is why I went from rounded off large wire to small wire with every other pulled out. I had the small wire like new already so for corn and bean capacity I pulled every other wire and wheat I install covers.

 

[trakman]

doorknob...no, we were cutting low as alot of the wheat is near the ground and not standing very well. Having to "eat" alot of straw! Combine was full all the time as it was really making the engine work!

seedcleaner....was getting alot of whitecaps and some straw stems. Seemed that the 1 1/2 half of the uncovered large wire concave was toooooo much. It is hard red winter wheat and moisture was around 11%.

 

[doorknob]

Ok, then you should've had plenty straw for threshing medium.

We're going to have some hard threshing spring wheat this year. Should be in a bout 6 weeks or so depending on the weather. I'll take lots of pictures and see if any may help.

Were you setting the machine from info you got from the clinic you went to? I'm not understanding the logic I guess behind the large wires so soon in the thresh section. Even with small wires, I'll be running probably the full first two concaves blanked. In grass its different, but for tough threshing like say clover seed, we run a set of rubber seed plates that blank off the entire concave 3 sections. This gets the material in proper shape for seperating and the remaining grate section has very little trouble doing its job.

Hope you get things ironed out and are happy with the machine.

 

[okpanhandle]

We're doing things different this year, but last year we used small wires and a cover plate over the first concave. We started without the plate, but couldn't get the sample clean enough. The cover plate really helped. This year we put a Lowen helical concave in the first position and left the large wire concaves (from corn/milo harvest) in the last two just to see what would happen. The sample looked terrible. We ended up replacing the large wires with small and things looked really good after that.

We're cutting some hard-to-thresh wheat (Danby) right now and we can't quite get rid of the white caps and pieces of head. It's acceptable enough to live with, but it would be nice to clean it up a bit more. A couple years ago we were cutting some Trego with the 1480 and 1680 and had to put cover plates on the first two concaves to clean it up. That is some tough wheat.

 

[kiwi]

are you guys running specialty rotors or standard.? We have a specialty and have similar problems and instead of blanking off the front concaves with plates we use interrupter bars on the first concave and where the returns come back in on the third. It helps alot but i know guys with standard rotors who don't have to do any of that to make a very good sample.
The only other adjustment we haven't done is get every rasp bar shimmed out so that they are all identical distance from the concave . This will be our last resort otherwise we have to go to a standard rotor or gorden bars as we do mostly wheat and raddish.

 

[renman]

We had similar experience with the blanking pieces. We ran three large wires with the front two concaves blanked and it did not help reduce white caps and unthreshed heads.

We now run three small wires in hard red spring, 12% moisture and we are satisfied. BTW the machine is an '01 2388 with a standard rotor.

 

[okpanhandle]

We're got moved to a different variety and are still having trouble cleaning the sample (white caps, pieces of head, a few small pieces of stem). Thing is, this variety threshed really nice on a different field. We're harvesting HWW, about 10-12% moisture; still running the Lowen and two small wire concaves. We've got a standard rotor and 36' header, too. Nothing we do seems to clean the sample much.

The field we're on now got some pretty bad wind and hail damage last Friday and there are a lot of broken-over heads. We're shaving the ground to salvage what we can, but I'm thinking 36 feet of (formerly) 75-80bu straw might be part of our problem, just too much trash going through the machine. I miss the Kuchar concaves on our old combines.

 

[doorknob]

What are your other settings? I'm having a tough time figuring out the problem with caps and heads in the tank with a helical and cover plates. I know the crossflow fan has trouble with heavily loaded chaffers. ? But it seems that you should have enough material for threshing, and with a helical and covers, you should get the heads threshed before falling through the wires. If they're empty head tips, or shrivelled kernal tips, that would further the idea of the fan not being up to par. Those bits should make it out the back.

Just trying to learn from others situations. Thanks.

 

[kiwi]

sounds like you need to take out the middle concave and zero the concaves to the rotor. then slowly bring your concave out until you believe you are making an acceptable sample and fine tune with your shoe sieve.
We harvest soft wheat at 17% moisture when white caps can be a problem but always get an acceptable sample but often have the concave setting on 1 and the fan on 1080 and the shoe sieve open no wider than 1/4 ". We always get a good sample but i sometimes which i could do it with more open settings as that would increase our capacity.

 

[kiwi]

sounds like you need to take out the middle concave and zero the concaves to the rotor. then slowly bring your concave out until you believe you are making an acceptable sample and fine tune with your shoe sieve.
We harvest soft wheat at 17% moisture when white caps can be a problem but always get an acceptable sample but often have the concave setting on 1 and the fan on 1080 and the shoe sieve open no wider than 1/4 ". We always get a good sample but i sometimes which i could do it with more open settings as that would increase our capacity.

 

[doorknob]

Yes, A&I have covers for the helicals, but I dont think they have any in stock as I just tryed yesturday to order some from my local dealership. You can see them on loewen's site.

I do the same thing setting the seives. Eyeball for the crop, then fine tune accordingly. Have you plugged the tailing at all? If not, I wonder if you can close the bottom just a tickle. ?

I'm looking forward to getting to use my new Loewen helicals. I've been using the Gorden helicals, but they have no wires. On approx. a 13.5" wide concave, the helicals have an extra 2" of bar surface, plus the allmost true 90 degree to material flow orientation of the bars, should really make things happen. Looking at the angle,a guy might think a stock straight bar concave would act similar to a transport vane than a concave which is to retard material.

I'd about bet that if you were to do a quick kill on the machine, without any cover plates, you'd find that the broken wheat heads are falling through the concave too soon. IE: some heads are even broken before they reach the concaves. Then as soon as the head hits the concave, it is forced through the wires before it can make another revolution with the straw material to rub against it and thresh the grain out.
In grass seed I tryed the no cover plates a few years back to soo if I could gain some capacity. What happened was the seed heads did'nt get enough rubbing before it was sent through the concave. We had a lot of what is called "doubles". That is in a way similar to the white caps and head tips you see. Doubles are 2 or more seeds still bound together by plant material. As soon as I installed the cover plates, the doubles went away. Once the doubles were gone, it made it easier to make other adjustments to clear up other issues that might slow me down.

Here's a pic of the gorden helicals. They have no wires, but the bars are closer together and smaller metal. I like them. They do a good jobe. I am going to the loewen helicals with the wires to se if i can make the air-jet chaffer work in grass. The air-jet is a great concept and I'd like to see it work. However the problem has allways been the amount of straw spearing the screen get. I'm hoping that the wires and the other changes I made this year will help that spearing problem. We'll see.

 

[okpanhandle]

Thanks for the advice, guys. I've been planting most of the day, but finally got on the combine this evening and things looked a lot better. There were no whitecaps or anything, just some chaff that didn't get blown out. Dad is thinking the wheat was just really hard to thresh due to the drought. We had a few days of 100+ degree weather right at the time when we pulled the sprinkler off to water corn. I guess the wheat just started to dry down before it was fully mature and that made it tougher. It was 101 degrees today with 20% humidity, that makes everything easier to thresh. We finished that field tonight, though, so we don't have to worry about it any more. The landlord is getting another sprinkler, too, so we don't have to tow one between two fields. Hurray!

We've got 60 acres left, hopefully we won't have any problems. I'll look into a plate for our Lowen for next year.

 

[okpanhandle]

We're not running a cover plate right now. Can one be put on a helical concave? We've got a large wire in the shop that's modded for a plate, but not the helical. We're doing as good a job now as we did last year with the cover plate, but it's still not quite like our old machines. Dad said about 10:30 this morning it started threshing better and he could go a little faster; I guess the humidity from this morning finally burned off.

The rotor is running at 920 (no load), I had it at 970 yesterday. The fan is at 1080. The concaves are set to 1.8, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. The in-cab display and the gauge outside don't show the same thing. When we first started harvest I closed the concaves a little more than that and heard the rotor scrape them. I'm not sure what the sieves are set to, we just eyeball them to start and fine tune them to get things just right. We're not throwing much out the back.